How to Be A Morning Exercise Person

If you’re someone who really doesn’t like exercise or struggles to make it to the gym after work, I have to tell you that morning exercise is the answer to all of your problems. You get it out of the way before you’re even conscious, you don’t have to spend all day at work dreading your evening workout and you can go straight home at the end of the day and do something better like sitting down. It’s the morning part that we all find a struggle so here are a few tips to help you get out of the bed and into your runners!

Prepare The Night Before

You need to have everything in a little Nanna pile right by the door. I’m talking socks, shoes, keys, towel, water bottle – everything. Don’t let a lost sports bra or not being able to find your favourite water bottle be a lame excuse to not go. Have your clothes in a pile ready to step into and your keys and wallet ready to go. No excuses.

Don’t Do It Every Morning

If it’s difficult for you to get out of bed in the morning, don’t punish yourself every day. Try two or three times a week. There’s nothing worse than looking at a week full of 6am training sessions. Start slow.

A Bad Night’s Sleep Is A Terrible Excuse

So you didn’t sleep well. Cry me a freaking river. Exercise is one of the greatest things you can do when you haven’t slept well. It will make what could have been an awful day into an amazing one. Don’t take my word for it, try it yourself. Note how you feel on a bad sleep + no exercise day and compare it to a day when you slept badly but dragged yourself to the gym in the morning. It hurts a lot for the first five minutes but that beats a whole day of feeling cranky and sore. It’s worth it. I promise.

Dish Out The Dosh

There’s nothing like money as a motivator. If you pre-pay for a specialty class or a bootcamp there’s far more incentive to get out of bed, particularly if it’s a bit on the expensive side. For instance a trip to my gym costs about $2 per session at a pro rata rate from my monthly membership fee and if I skip a morning session I can always lie to myself and say I’ll go later. However my bootcamp costs about $18 per session and if I miss a session, I can’t make it up later. That $18 is goneski. It’s much harder to stay in bed knowing you’re actively wasting money.

Meet A Friend

It’s an oldie but a goody. You’ll feel like a right a-hole if your friend gets up at 6am in the freezing cold to meet you for a jog and you don’t show up plus it’s fantastic to have a person who will hold you accountable.

Make Sure Your Alarm Is Far Away From Where You Sleep

Try setting your alarm clock or phone and putting it with your clothes on the other side of your room. That way you’ll have to get up to turn it off and the first thing you see is your exercise gear. It’s all about tricking your brain, people.

Are you an early morning exerciser? What tricks do you employ to get your butt out the door?

About Carly Jacobs

Carly is the founding editor of Smaggle which launched in 2007 back when blogging was weird. She has appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Cosmopolitan and Cleo magazines. Hoop earrings are totally her thing and she almost got run over by Myf Warhurst while out jogging one day.

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30 Comments

Great tips, and worth a try. I am SO not a morning person, but because my job will be going full-time soon, I might want to consider moving my workouts to the morning. Otherwise, I wouldn’t get home at night until almost 7 p.m., which would be reason enough to be tempted to skip my workout all together! Ugh. 9-5 sucks.

These are great tips Carly – I follow most of them myself so I can confirm they work. The friend one is particularity good, I get up at 5.45am 3 times a week for the gym, because a friend gives me a lift, and we can’t let each other down. We don’t even go to the same gym, she drops me off at mine, the heads down road to hers.

These are great tips and I’ve heard them before but they really are helpful! The worst is in winter when all you want to do is sleep. That being said I love exercising in the morning so will try again 😀

Can I just say that reading your post just this morning made me get up and go for a run. I’ve been really lacking motivation to exercise since quitting cheerleading, which I used to get up every monday and friday at 6am for. I’d been going for a run maybe once a month, including this past tuesday. Then, my brain would say to itself, “exercise? check!” but your article inspired me to just get up and go. I felt like you were just saying to me, “suck it up, princess!” and now, back from my run, I feel awesome and happy with myself. TL;DR – You made me run right now. Thanks!

Here’s the ironic thing which stops me from buying into the whole “get it out of the way” mindset. I’m very anxious when it comes to blood clots/stroke/heart attack etc. and after reading how exercise alone is not nearly enough moving to help protect us from such things, I almost use that as a backwards excuse not to exercie in the morning. The crazy path my mind takes is something like “well if I exercised first thing in the morning, maybe I’ll convince myself later it’s ok to shlump around for hours on end so I won’t exercise now, I’ll exercise later”. It makes absolutely no sense, trust me, I know, but that’s the way it is. Instead, I find myself waking up, peeing, drinking a glass of water, and then marching/jogging on the spot for ten minutes. Repeat every hour or so. And then try and fit in 30-45 minutes of exercise later in the day.

I’ve just started this morning exercise thing this week and think it’s a winner! It’s hard at the start yes, but I love the feeling after I’ve done it! Your tips are great. I’ve done the alarm thing – it’s getting up out of bed that’s the hard part! Once I’m up it’s like ‘well I may as well go because I ain’t getting back to sleep now! Brilliant.

I wish, I wish, I wish I was a morning exercise person, but I just am not. Reading this post has reminded me that the only thing standing in the way of that happening is me! I am a morning person, and routinely wake up at 6am. So why not get up then and go for a walk if it’s nice, or do a workout inside if it isn’t? Eh, I just don’t. Lady Smaggle, I’m putting your tips into place, and will make it happen tomorrow morning, I promise! (I particularly love the calendar you have. Seeing it all laid out like that, with sleep-in mornings listed too, makes it all that much more achievable.)

How funny! I only just read this article but I’ve been doing the morning exercise thing for the past week. I do feel SO much better on days where I do exercise that it’s motivation enough at the moment. OH and I sleep in my sports bra and exercise top, and have the rest of my gear in a little pile right next to my bed.

“So you didn’t sleep well. Cry me a freaking river. Exercise is one of the greatest things you can do when you haven’t slept well. ”

This is dangerous information to be passing out to people in the guise of an expert. If you haven’t slept well and feel run down in the morning, you’re either not going to push yourself hard enough to make it worth your time, or you’ll push it too hard and cause more harm than good (and not just physically). Get your sleep right, it should be on the top of your priorities, and THEN work out.

Thanks for your input, I appreciate the time you took to comment. That advice is based on personal experience, as I stated in the article and no where did I say I was an expert. I’m certainly not suggesting that anyone should pump iron on 2 hours sleep. Obviously sleeping well is better but that’s not an option for everyone and a bad nights sleep is a very common and often false excuse for people to skip their workouts.

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[…] Are you a morning exercise person? I totally used to be. I used to get up at 5:30 AM to go swimming twice a week for 5 years. I can’t even begin to imagine how hard it would be to start that up again.This article had some great advice on finding your get-up-and-go. […]